From Library Journal
This examines the effect of the intellectual community on popular culture and is freqently incomprehensible. Ross, author of The Failure of Modernism (Columbia Univ. Pr., 1986), says it best himself: "Insofar as that antagonism can be thought of, for the sake of shorthand, as an abstractly objective relation between 'intellectuals' and 'ordinary people,' it is fractionated, in reality, into countless arrangements of minute differences of taste and consumption, each governed by the authority of cultural competence, whether inherited or else explained by reference to an occupational hierarchy based on education and training." This scholarly but jargon-filled discussion of hip and camp, music, television, film, pornography, and the Cold War is not for Ross's "ordinary people."-- Jo Cates, Poynter Inst. for Media Studies Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Kurzbeschreibung
Disrespect/hostility, paternalism/deference, elitism/populism, authority/delinquency - these are some of the features that characterise the historically fraught relationship between intellectuals and popular culture. In arguing that these features are inherently linked, No Respect shows how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is mutually bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America over the past fifty years. Far from an aesthetic activity, 'taste' is seen as an exercise in cultural power which serves to police and to redefine the social relations between 'educated' and 'ordinary' people. Categories of taste like hip, camp, kitsch, sick and midcult are analyzed through examples drawn from bebop jazz, soul music, drag shows, 'bad' films, performance comedy, TV quiz shows, spy fiction, women's pornography, and the 'people's culture' of the popular front.
